Integrating authority, deontics, and communications within a joint intention framework

Abstract

Many agents are fielded within environments requiring modeling traditional organizational structures such as military hierarchies and corporations, with their associated authority relationships and a strong form of responsibility associated with the subordinate agents. Furthermore, communications between agents placed in such environments benefit from a strong, consistent semantic model to express not only the source's goal but more importantly their intent as well. Addressing the need above, we have developed an integrated semantic framework for modeling and operationalizing authority relationships, deontic operators, and inter-agent communications based upon joint intention theory. This allows us to not only regularize the representation and reasoning components of agents but to also realize: improved coordination due to enhanced agent teamwork (persistence and robustness toward successful achievement of goals even in the face of problems); improved conformance of the behavior of each agent according to its organizational role and authority related to other organizational positions; and improved bounding of the behavior of agents when faced with the imposition of deontic operators from various sources.